Reviewed by:

• Who's Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran
• Mary Mcalpin (bio)

Who's Black and Why? is a collection of essays submitted in response to contests sponsored in the eighteenth century by the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences. Together with the editors' impressive introductory material, these essays do indeed reveal, as the work's subtitle indicates, the how and the why of the invention of "race" in the modern sense of this term. The "when" of this invention is implicitly considered as well, for one of the unstated purposes of this collection seems to be to dispel the lingering belief that scientific approaches to racial categorization began to develop only in the nineteenth century. This volume clearly demonstrates that the confluence of colonial exploitation and Enlightenment rationalism in the mid-eighteenth century had serious consequences for those peoples whom Europeans considered racially inferior to themselves. The editors bring considerable expertise to placing the nineteen essays included in this collection in their historical context. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is among the most eminent scholars of African American literature and history, while Andrew Curran's Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (2013) established him as a major voice in the history of race and science in the eighteenth century. Additional contributors to the volume include the four translators: Sheldon Cheek, Rosanna Giammanco, Karen C. C. Dalton, and Susan Emanuel. Working from Latin and French, they have made these little-known essays newly available in accessible English prose. [End Page 795]

Founded in 1712, the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences was dedicated to the promotion of "mankind's happiness," a goal the members set out to achieve in part by offering prize money for the best essays on a variety of subjects. Who's Black and Why? is divided into two parts corresponding to two separate essay competitions, the first in the 1740s (on the origin of Blackness) and the second in the 1770s (on how to improve the survival rate of those confined in slave ships crossing the Atlantic). Such contests were common at the time in France; Jean-Jacques Rousseau's two Discourses (1750, 1755) were of course entries to similar competitions sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The interest of the relatively minor essays produced for the two competitions proposed by the Bordeaux Academy lies, as the editors argue, in what these highly varied pieces reveal about changing cultural attitudes toward race and slavery as the eighteenth century, and thus the Enlightenment philosophical project, progressed. For those who might question the utility of publishing treatises based in views of the human body and mind that have since been quite thoroughly disproved, the editors note the three "unspoken" questions at the heart of the academy's competitions: Who is Black? Why? and, most important, "What did being Black signify?" (ix).

The first, much longer section of the collection presents sixteen essays received by the Bordeaux Academy in 1741 in response to a call for considerations of "the physical cause of the Negro's color" (qtd. in Who's ix). A cash prize of three hundred livres was offered, but none of the essays was considered good enough to merit the prize money. The introduction to this first collection of essays is in many ways the most interesting and important section of the book. In it, the editors review the scientific and religious considerations at play in the very posing of the question of the origin of Blackness. This introduction also answers, to great effect, the question "Why Bordeaux?" Why did this particular institution, that is, among the host of other academies of science active in France at this time, "find the question of blackness so compelling" (8)? We learn that the choice of topic corresponded to a sharp rise in the number of enslaved individuals passing through the Port of Bordeaux on their way to the French...

审阅者：

• 谁是黑人，为什么？十八世纪种族发明的隐藏章节编辑。作者：小亨利·路易斯·盖茨和安德鲁·S·柯兰
• 玛丽·麦卡尔平（简介）

谁是黑人，为什么？是为回应十八世纪波尔多皇家科学院主办的竞赛而提交的论文集。连同编辑们令人印象深刻的介绍性材料，这些文章确实揭示了，正如该书的副标题所示，现代意义上的“种族”一词的发明方式和原因。这项发明的“何时”也被隐含地考虑在内，因为这本集合的未说明的目的之一似乎是消除人们挥之不去的信念，即种族分类的科学方法仅在十九世纪才开始发展。本书清楚地表明，十八世纪中叶殖民剥削与启蒙运动理性主义的结合，给欧洲人认为在种族上不如自己的那些民族带来了严重后果。编辑们凭借丰富的专业知识将本集中包含的十九篇文章置于其历史背景中。小亨利·路易斯·盖茨 (Henry Louis Gates Jr.) 是非裔美国文学和历史领域最杰出的学者之一，而安德鲁·柯兰 (Andrew Curran) 的《黑人解剖学：启蒙时代的科学与奴隶制》(Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in a Age of Enlightenment) (2013) 使他成为美国种族和科学史上的主要代言人。十八世纪。该书的其他贡献者包括四位译者：Sheldon Cheek、Rosanna Giammanco、Karen CC Dalton 和 Susan Emanuel。他们利用拉丁文和法文，将这些鲜为人知的文章以易于理解的英语散文形式呈现出来。[完第795页]

波尔多皇家科学院成立于 1712 年，致力于促进“人类的幸福”，其成员通过为各种主题的最佳论文提供奖金来部分实现这一目标。谁是黑人，为什么？分为两个部分，对应于两个独立的征文比赛，第一个是 1740 年代（关于黑人的起源），第二个是 1770 年代（关于如何提高那些被困在横渡大西洋的奴隶船上的人的生存率）。这种竞赛在当时的法国很常见。让·雅克·卢梭的两篇《论说》（1750年、1755年）当然是第戎学院主办的类似比赛的参赛作品。正如编辑们所说，波尔多学院为两项竞赛撰写的相对较小的论文的兴趣在于，这些高度多样化的文章揭示了十八世纪对种族和奴隶制的文化态度的变化，以及启蒙运动的哲学计划，进步了。对于那些可能质疑出版基于人体和心灵观点的论文是否有用的人，编辑们指出了学院竞​​赛核心的三个“不言而喻”的问题：谁是黑人？为什么？最重要的是，“身为黑人意味着什么？” （九）。

该文集的第一部分较长，展示了波尔多学院 1741 年收到的 16 篇论文，以响应考虑“黑人肤色的物理原因”的号召（《Who's ix》中的 qtd. ）。提供了三百里弗的现金奖励，但没有一篇文章被认为足以值得奖金。从很多方面来说，第一本论文集的引言是本书中最有趣和最重要的部分。在其中，编辑们回顾了在提出黑人起源问题时所发挥的科学和宗教考虑。这篇介绍还有效地回答了“为什么选择波尔多？”的问题。为什么这个特殊的机构，即当时在法国活跃的众多其他科学院，“发现黑人问题如此引人注目”（8）？我们了解到，主题的选择对应于通过波尔多港前往法国的奴隶人数急剧增加......